The end of a calendar year prompts a host of media articles and programs that attempt to capture the highlights and lowlights of the past 365 days. Politics, celebrities, Nobel Prize winners, Oscar winning movies, books, wars and tragedies often dominate the content.

I was initially tempted, as a result, to develop my own Top 10 List of Achievements at TCS. The problem with creating such a synopsis is that a list of achievements is not a truly representative method of capturing the essence of a year. Also, inevitably someone or something is accidentally left off the list! Furthermore, as a school, the calendar year really represents two different academic years – the second half of 2017-2018 and the first half of 2018-2019 – which adds to the degree of difficulty in synthesizing a single calendar year.

This week, all of our Senior School students and teachers, and many staff members, have been involved with our annual Week Without Walls initiative. In this, the 10th anniversary of this incredible service initiative, there are approximately 500 students and nearly 100 adults out of the typical classroom, actively volunteering in the greater community.

Towards the end of the last semester of the 2017-2018 academic year I interviewed six of our Grade 5 students. My intention in doing so was to, in the future, create a video for our faculty and staff that would hopefully identify the strengths of TCS from the perspective of our youngest and newest “recruits.” As adults in the TCS community, while we know we have something special here at TCS, we sometimes struggle to describe succinctly the one or two things that make TCS distinctive and/or that distinguish our learning environment from others. My goal in interviewing the kids was to hopefully capture the School’s essence “from the mouth of babes,” as it were.

Like many experiments, particularly unscientific ones, the outcome can vary from the hypothesis. And, sometimes the conclusion is even better than you imagined. And this was the case on May 21, 2018 between 10:00 and 10:30 a.m.

This past weekend at the School, we hosted a strategic planning workshop in the Cirne Commons. Led by TCS governor, past parent and associate dean of MBA and master’s programs at the Smith School of Business at Queen’s University, Dr. Elspeth Murray P’08 ’10, 50 representatives from the broad TCS community offered their thoughts on the future of our beloved school. Parents, alumni, faculty, staff, board and foundation members, trustees and our head girl actively participated in identifying the strengths, opportunities and challenges facing independent schools in general, and specifically, TCS.

This workshop was one of many efforts – which have also included employee listening sessions, a survey to more than 7,500 community members, work groups and one-on-one conversations – initiated by the School and board, to solicit input on the near and distant future of Trinity College School.